February 2, 2012

In the late 1980s, my wife discovered this product that made my hair look great. But, the company that made it immediately went out of business. Over time, we started to notice a pattern: whatever product I liked would quickly tank in the marketplace.

Obviously, most of these extinct favorites of mine are completely forgotten by now, but let me give one example that a few people of a certain age might still remember: Lotus 123 3.0. The 1.0 release of this spreadsheet in 1983 was an epochal hit, establishing the software standard for IBM PC compatibility. The 3.0 release, which came out around 1990 or 1991, was elegantly three dimensional: almost anything you could do in two dimensions on one spreadsheet, such as summing the contents of adjacent cells, you could just easily do in three dimensions across stacked worksheets. You could build a workbook out of 13 worksheets, one for each month and one aggregating the whole year. You could build graphs across each month's worksheet.

Thus, for example, I built a sales forecasting system for the marketing research company where I worked where each region had their own single sheet based on a template I'd designed. Each week, they'd Fed Ex me a copy and I would aggregate them into one workbook with a top sheet summing up the national forecast on the underlying regional sheets. It was a piece of cake because it worked exactly as visualized.

In 1993, I was hired by the other big firm in the industry to build them a similar system. The only difference was I had to do it in Microsoft Excel because they had standardized on that. What a nightmare. Even though I knew exactly what I was doing, it took me three times as long to re-design it in Excel. I spent 50 or 100 hours on the phone with Microsoft technical support over the random things that in Excel worked in 2d but turned out not to work in 3d. The weird thing was that, as far as I can tell, I was the only customer in the world who missed the 3d nature of 1-2-3 3.0 when switching to Excel. Nobody at Microsoft could grasp what I was whining about -- Why would you want to be able to do things across worksheets that you can do within worksheets? -- and none of the PC magazines seemed to notice this lack in Excel.

(When software executive Jim Manzi became a pundit, I wrote him a long email thanking him for 1-2-3 3.0. He wrote back to say that that was a different software executive named Jim Manzi who had been head of Lotus.)

Eventually, after countless examples of whatever products I particularly liked going out of business, my wife suggested that I should start my own marketing research company to test new product ideas. It would use a sample size of one: me. I would just sit in a room and be handed potential products. If I liked the widget, the client's board of directors should immediately fire their CEO. If I really liked it, the board should liquidate the firm immediately for whatever it could get.

I can quite believe that a chimp dressed in a suit and tie would have a higher rate of predicting what would be a hit product than I would.

actually poses a risk to chimpanzees because people lose sight of the fact they're an endangered species and become less likely to help save them.

Ross has made this pitch every year the company featured chimps in commercials but now he's hoping a recent Duke University study supporting his argument might help turn public opinion against the commercials.

I recently predicted that the use of chimpanzees in advertisements and movies was doomed because Americans are slowly coming to understand that chimps belong in Africa. But it's interesting that this professional is using a quite different argument to argue for the same end. Poor Dr. Ross probably doesn't realize it, but his cause is likely doomed because I predicted he will succeed.

Bizarre. Read the first paragraph and it struck a chord. I used to use Suave Clean Hair shampoo. Wasn't anything fancy. It cleaned my hair. Worked as advertised! Then it went away and I had to find something that wasn't fruity-smelling and wouldn't weigh my hair down with whatever crap they put in shampoos - I want the oil OUT of my hair, not stuff PUT INTO it.

Perhaps you could enlarge your sample group to include my family. Whatever flavor of some product my husband or sons like is discontinued within 6 months of our discovering it - juice, energy bars, etc. I went months trying to find my husband regular (i.e. not low fat or fat free) popcorn WITHOUT artificial butter flavor. The peach tea my husband drinks way too much of, at the QT convenience stores, has just been replaced by a different recipe he dislikes. I could go on, but you get the point. We are also, obviously, intensely anti-trend.

Garnier has a nice conditioner that you can put on wet or dry hair. It comes in an apple green bottle with some line about easing frizz. It doesn't create buildup and is good if you didn't think you needed conditioner but did (i.e. because your hair is a bird's nest unless the temp is 40 F or lower when it's shiny and straight and you're sure you're no longer you.)

There was a cheap Lotus organizer I believe it's still being sold. I have one stored in a box with a Windows 98 PC. It's better than Mac's iCalendar and doesn't connect to the internet for those of us who'd prefer our organizers not be easily available to hackers.

Your husband could be in popcorn heaven once he traded that microwave in for an authentic popcorn popper. He could also improve on that pre-made peach tea by making his own. Besides, those plastic bottles give men man-boobs.

I’m like that with restaurants. I like simple, good, inexpensive American or Italian food that you can go to a counter or buffet to get without waiter service. But I live in Northwest Washington DC, where these kinds of places “down their shutters,” as they say in India, every week, to be replaced by incomprehensible, exotic, expensive dishes that must be ordered through waiters.

An example of a great, once ubiquitous, product that seems to have disappeared from stores is Tussy deodorant cream. Cheap and simple, and it works. I know it can be found on Amazon, but why big chains like Walgreens dropped it is a mystery.

Garnier hair products, sold in garish bright green bottles at Target, are not what I'd consider to be "products geared to elite consumers". If the shampoo you buy is only sold in fancy salons and costs $35 a bottle - that's the elite consumer hair care market.

The 'if we like it, it will disappear' phenomenon happens all the time in the slyboots household. Often, we will buy multiples of things we really like, as a sort of hedge against this problem.

What an idiot. If people never see chimps, they will lack sympathy for them. If you want people to respond to any "save the chimps" campaign the first thing is to convince them chimps are cute, therefore worth saving.

The guy who wrote it, Jonathan Sachs, now makes program for digital photography (Picture Window: http://dl-c.com/ ). Unlike the monstrosity that is Adobe Photoshop, it's a small and super fast program that still does 99.99% of what people editing bitmaps ever need a program to do. Highly recommended.

There used to be a "sweet" (candy) sold in Britain called Spangles. No longer - but I found them delicious. You could also use their wrappers to repair the windscreen wiper on your Morris Minor, also sadly withdrawn from production.

I've had the impression lately that some of the stores I frequent stock fewer items with less variety. The aisles seem a little wider too, as if a few shelving units had been removed. I've been lucky so far that my brands are the ones that remain. However I've had the problem with disappearing product lines in the past. Sometimes they get tired. Once I developed multiple favorites, I discovered the others hardly ever disappear anymore.

I think chimps are amusing, and support their being kept around. But if they go extinct, what's the loss, really? Will wine cease to gladden the heart? Will young people no longer fall in love? Will restaurant menus reduce to one, soviet item? What?

The environment (and its nonhuman inhabitants) is a luxury good. Full stop.

Zounds, Steve, the same thing happens to me with products. Clif Bars used to make a chocolate bar with whole espresso beans it in. I relied on them for hiking and backpacking, so of course they quit making them. Venom lo-carb energy drinks are the bomb, plus they use metal bottles which can be reused as water bottles. Almost impossible to find now. Every good New Balance boots I find are soon discontinued, and I often cannot afford to buy two pairs in two months for a backup....

Why don't you write about something fun, like today being Shakira's 35th birthday and how as a 30-something she does teenybopper music, while when she really was 18 she wrote and recorded 35-year-old sounding music?

And does this have any meaning with respect to larger society's refusal to exit adolescence these days?

I relate to this when it comes to politics. Born in the late 70's during the birth dearth, I realized a long time ago that just about anything I considered a pressing matter just wasn't for the vast majority of Americans.

I've been poring over the exit polls done thus far and we've been having the wrong discussions around here. Middle-aged and old people, who are overwhelmingly white btw, are firmly in the driver's seat (already factored in that older people are more diligent voters). Granted, nobody disagrees as we all know the baby-boomers are entering their twilight years, but it hasn't been front and center like it really needs to be. The only question that should be asked about politics in the near future are, "What do baby-boomers want?" That's it. We've gotten too caught up in asking what minorities or whites want in general.

I think our politics and climate could be in for some radical times in the next couple of decades.(Dems are younger, but this doesn't change much.)

Iowa:17-29: 15%30-44 16%45-64: 42%65+: 26%

New Hampshire:18-29: 12%30-44: 19%45-64: 48%65+: 21%

South Carolina:18-29: 9%30-44: 19%45-64: 45%65+: 27%

Florida:18-29: 6%30-44: 15%45-64: 42%65+: 36%

(It wasn't just a closed primary that hurt Paul in Florida. He took 25% of the 18-29 group, but only 3% of the 65+ group. Boomers have grown quite staid and gave him only 5% of their votes. His total was 7%.)

There is an article in Psychology Today called Are You with the Right Mate? It includes some rather bizarre pics of a couple, wherein the man is replaced by a chimp. The first one is a wedding kiss and the other three are just as bad. I know all about the anti-male trend in the media but this one is really twisted. What were they thinking?

I saw a news story that some game farms in Texas are preserving African species like giraffes and emus. I think that's great - just leave out the monkeys, apes, chimps and all the other African stuff, and we won't need to support our African zoo anymore.

Speaking of endangered species that thrive in America yet animal goo-goos wish to thwart, 60 Minutes had a segment this past Sunday about Texas ranchers and their herds of African species used for high dollar hunting scenarios.

The 60 Minutes reporter was the attractive South African babe who was mauled recently in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

The story was mainly about "scimatar horned orex" who seem to thrive in the hill country outsied of San Antonio but are native to Senegal, Chad ...

Physical goods never hang around. Once they go out of fashion for no good reason, their recipes can be preserved, but so much of their production is based on acquiring a very specific mix of raw materials and having very product-specific infrastructure.

No one is going to keep the materials stocked and machinery idle once it's unfashionable, so the product is gone forever.

Informational goods can be preserved very well and re-issued decades, centuries, or millennia later on. Paper is paper, and printing presses can churn out any book. As long as there are still books being made at all, any particular one won't be impossible to get.

That's probably why people get more nostalgic for physical goods like breakfast cereals, clothes, toys, tech hardware, even the built environment -- malls, diving boards, merry-go-rounds, etc. They're much more likely to be unavailable, and they made a more direct sensory impression on you way back when.

I've always felt the same way myself - that any particular product or business I like will fail. Actually most of the products that you and I like probably succeed. It's just the failures that we notice.

The internet has eliminated some of the problem, though. Nowadays many products that may not be worthwhile for stores to stock on shelves can be found online.

Understand your pain, learned to write with the legendary WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, an absolutely great program, now the world runs the completely counter-intuitive Microsoft Word whatever version 2010 or 2011. I still don't know Word a third as well as I knew WordPerfect but what can I do? Everything is MS Office centric in the world. Speaking of spreadsheets, I heard that a program called Wingz had quite a following as well, but was owned by big computer software company who didn't understand how to market it. It died an unfortunate death as well.

Here in California it is difficult to wash an automobile without leaving ugly water spots. The water is just too chock full of crap. About three years ago a miracle occurred. Mr. Clean came out with a kit called "The Mr. Clean AutoDry Car Wash System." If the instructions were followed it worked perfectly. The tap water was filtered and the car dryed without a spot. The product is no longer available and I just know it's because most people who tried it didn't follow the instructions. I have a lot of trouble with products I like too though.

There were 3 or 4 really fancy spreadsheets, going further in exactly the direction you're talking about. They were all for the NeXT operating system, which no one used. Weirdly, this includes a Lotus product, which another commenter mentions above. Of course, since no one used NeXT and it was hard to port programs from it, so they all died. Except that the current Mac OS, starting around 2000, is essentially NeXT, so they could have easily reached a large audience there, but it was too late or something.

My theory of spreadsheets is that their purpose is to be sufficiently opaque and jury-rigged that the user can obtain whatever result he wants. Anything that reduces bugginess, like the feature you want, makes them less useful in the common use case.

The same thing happens to me. One day, everything is fine, the next, you have to adjust to a life without Pimp Juice.

I felt the same away about Lotus 123; Excel was never as intuitive or useful. Likewise I never liked Word as much as WordPerfect. As a user of company PC's, I had no choice but to use the facsimile Microsoft products that replaced the originals. I had this great calendar and contacts program called Sidekick that I loved. The same features in Outlook just seem clunky and needlessly intricate.

"The weird thing was that, as far as I can tell, I was the only customer in the world who missed the 3d nature of 1-2-3 3.0 when switching to Excel. Nobody at Microsoft could grasp what I was whining about -- Why would you want to be able to do things across worksheets that you can do within worksheets? -- and none of the PC magazines seemed to notice this lack in Excel."

They may not have "gotten it" but it's also probable that those PC Magazines were paid to talk up Microsoft products, and to talk down competing non-Microsoft products. So they weren't motivated to try to understand what you were talking about.

Yes, it's technically possible that a story about zoo chimps reminded you of business software titles from 20 years ago. Otherwise that reads like a close parody of the modern solipsistic fit-of-boredom blog post. It's not often we witness writers gleaning the hidden yet profound life-lessons from such material. Maybe because there aren't any?

One: Do not get me started on the superior manageability (and user comprehension), of Windows XP to the masochism required of users for their endurance of the blindfolded and gagged horrors of Windows 7.

Three: Back when I cultivated a fond taste for Jack Daniels, it was distilled & sold at 90-proof. Last time I looked it was a measly 80-proof. No wonder we’re becoming a nation of wimps. Can I be alone in suspecting that Jack Daniels’ lowered proof may also have something to do with the decline of the US space program?

Four: My 1966 Volvo 122S (of the model line known also as the “Amazon”) was a bare-bones, incredibly simple & cheap to work-on-yourself, thrifty, astonishingly durable (my Amazon finally died with nearly 600,000 miles on its odometer) apotheosis of Industrial Revolution technology, and it had the most sensible, comfortable, posture-friendly, fatigue-defying seats of any of the many cars I’ve since owned. The Amazon was the car that built Volvo’s reputation for rugged durability; all Volvos after 1967 have, in perfect parallel with the massive metastasis of the Leviathan State, accelerated the demolition of that reputation and, at the same, time bought for Volvos their newer repute as the most safety-feature-jam-packed idiot-proof form of motor transport for human crash dummies.

Five: Oh, for original Switzer’s licorice. The old family-owned firm went belly up a few years back, sold the brand name to some MegaGlobal Conglomerate that, under the Switzer’s name, sells a product which it has the consummate gall to labels as licorice that has the appearance and tooth-feel of cheap vinyl that suffers all too slickly-slimily from an excess application of Armor-All.

Six: Sometimes a product whose purpose I thought silly, whose performance or advantage over other products of its sort was never evident and fell dismally short of its competitors, and that I never liked, vanishes. Speaking of which, the oleaginous Don Cornelius, by use apparently of a pistol cartridge, just discontinued himself. Except for the orthodox genuflections paid him by Mainstream Media-Pravda, I expect Cornelius’s absence to go actually widely unlamented, and fittingly unremarked. (BTW, Cornelius punched himself out scant weeks after Golden Age Hollywood chimp Cheetah bit the dust. No doubt some of you, gentle readers, will take that as a prompt to cue the 'Twilight Zone' theme.)

Seven: Walmart no longer stocks Sani-Flush crystals - the most effective commode cleaner ever (and the most amusingly effervescent to watch in action). Now all they stock are the dribbly wimpy liquid toilet cleaners that mismanage to burp and dribble and spit assorted-sized globs of themselves all over the place, especially once you’ve already dispensed half their contents.

Eight: Worst, most unnecessary, and stupidest product “progress” ever: 4-bladed razors, which produce as much avoidable dermal havoc as disposable single-blade razors. The 4-blade scars piled upon older 4-blade razor scars around my ankles and knobbly knees have taken on an appalling resemblance to a relief map of the Himalaya, creating thereby a rather poignant, if equally unsightly, complement to my burgeoning crop of varicose veins. Installing four blades in a razor makes as much sense as putting four steering wheels, that you must control all at once, in a car: bloodshed becomes inevitably more frequent. Marketing 4-bladed razors is, although on a smaller scale of wounds suffered, eerily not unlike handing out firearms to drug carteliers à la Eric Holder’s Fast & Furious stroke of gee-knee-us.

Nine: Has anyone bemoaned the discontinuation of Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Saturns, Mercurys - or even Studebakers or De Sotos? Good. None of those heaps could hold a sparkplug to a Kaiser.

Ten: I’ve never heard of a human being ripping off the face of a chimp.

Many people, particularly those of an artistic sensibility, noticed a facial and physical resemblance between George W. Bush and a chimp. Noted British cartoonist, Steve Bell of 'The Guardian', made hay with this, and a very popular website showed chimp shots alongside stunningly faithful dubya lookalike photos. Considering the appalling record of Bush the younger, all I can say is that a pack of chimps, given executive control of the USA (perhaps by pulling clor-coded levers linked to a banana dispensing machine), would have done a better job. And I'm not joking either.

"Come on Steve, an anti-frizz hair product called 'Jew be Gone' was bound to fail."

You know, Cameron, I sometimes laugh when I read about a new discovery relating to the history of some tribe that the anthropologist's ancestors obliterated without taking any notes or pictures first.

It's often like that in life as well. A person or people can barge into someone else's turf believing they have an accurate assessment of the situation. They may even run that group out of town and "win" yet never have a clue who those people actually were and what their values were.

This is why I always preferred Cpt Picard to Cpt Kirk in the Star Trek series. Kirk was more likely to make a mistake due to precipitousness thinking he knew enough while Picard would gather information and weigh his options carefully. You can overwhelm someone and take control in a show of force over what probably isn't rightfully yours or you can take the opportunity to learn something that might be much more valuable than the turf you've conquered.

Of course, a simple-minded, acquisitive type probably can't be bettered by someone else's wisdom or a knowledge of why they do what they do. He'd probably never be driven to distraction later on by the idea he'd not at all understood the people he was replacing or displacing. Taking their stuff is all there is and good enough. Right?

I'm quite fond of Lipton's herbal Orange tea. But its no longer in any of the grocery stores that I go to. Thankfully, there is Amazon.

One other change I've noticed is with crock pots. My wife and I were given one when we were married that had a thick glass lid (about an inch thick). It lasted ~ 10 years until someone dropped it. We couldn't find a replacement that had the same thick lid (which would help to keep the heat/moisture in).

2. When the local grocery began offering 4-packs of Starbucks Coffee, I bought half the shelf stock (tiny) over a few weeks. Then one day, the remainder was non est and was never replaced. This was moons ago.

I've experienced disappearing snacks at walgreens myself only to discover they'd placed the nuts on a on the candy aisle, don't know why. Anyway, check about three over, towards the middle of the store.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.